IDENTITY POLITICS

Identity Politics: On Redistribution, Recognition and Intersectionality

Anavie R. Alegre

University of the Philippines-Visayas

Political Science 164

Prof. Mary Barbie Badayos-Jover

April 04, 2013

1

IDENTITY POLITICS

The arising focus on identity subverts the body politic, emphasizing differences rather

then commonalities in society. The struggle for recognition of these identities are mobilized

in the lines of nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality (Fraser, 1997). Concerns for

recognition arise because of social injustices the derail the rise of individual self-identity and

the undermining and absorption of the identities of these minorities into the majority that may

lead to the vanishing of the culture and tradition identification among these groups. The

vanishing of this identification arises the notion of the preservation of these cultures leading

to identity-based movements. The discourse of recognition is primarily rooted in what Fraser

identified into cultural injustice and socioeconomic injustice. Cultural injustice is rooted in

“social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication” (Fraser, 1997).

Socioeconomic injustice on the other hand roots from the political-economic structure of

society. These two are under a broader concept—Social Justice. To uphold Social Justice it is

essential to remedy the social ills that arise in Society. Fraser proposed that the remedies of

these injustices are redistribution and recognition.

Redistribution remedies for socioeconomic injustice dedifferentiate groups and that

recognition remedies for cultural injustices enhance group differentiation. She argued that

because of this, it is hard to focus on both simultaneously.

Alcoff (2006) stated in her book Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self the

concerns with regards to the redistribution and recognition dilemma. She stated that identity

pathologize the society because it is a form of balkanization. However, according to her,

there is a discrepancy between theoretical constructions of these realities and it’s practical

use. She stated the stand of Liberalists and Leftists groups in the issue of identity and focused

more on Fraser’s arguments regarding the topic. She pointed out that redistribution and

recognition have conflicting aims. Redistribution aims calls for the “abolishing economic

arrangements that underpin group specificity” (Alcoff, 2006). The demands that come with

this can either enhance or subvert inequalities. On the other hand, recognition claims calls

for the creation of group specificity and then affirming its value. Alcoff argued: “neither class

nor class identity can be separated from social identity”. Redistribution is an important facet

of society taking its roots from way back into history. According to her, it is the raison d’etre

of identity-based organizations. Fraser argues that to be able to lessen and ultimately

eradicate social inequalities, it is essential to veer away from asserting a groups’ identity and

focus more on the struggle for class status. She constructed recognition of identity into

recognition of status but Alcoff argues otherwise. According to her, recognition and

redistribution are bound up and mutually reinforce each other. To quote her:

2

IDENTITY POLITICS

Redistribution and recognition demands are interwoven not only at the level of the

resource allocations for the marginalized group.

The arguments of Alcoff assert that the redistribution and recognition is interwoven and

that they can’t be apart from each other. Her view is primarily based on the relationship of the

individual and society. Another different perspective was proposed by Ronald Sundstrom

which pertains to the transformation of minority legal rights in public policy. According to

this view the transformation of the browning of America threatens the long established racial

and ethnic demographic patterns and associated patterns of distribution of resources and

powers” (Sundstrom, 2008). The browning of America pertains to the demographic change in

the US that wishes to transform not only the population of the said country but also the

meaning of race and ethnicity. This demographic change presents the shift from a country

that is predominantly white towards it’s so called ‘browning’.

The concept of race and ethnicity is a sensitive issue in the US. Many scholars for the past

decades sought to delineate, clarify and critique these concepts, seeking for a more distinct

and a more clear definition for better specificity. These specifications helped to structure the

country’s political economy as well as the intimacies of social life in all aspects of society.

Ronald Sundstrom’s book Browning of America concentrates primary on the issue

concerning race and social justice in the US. He said that some scholars think colored

blindness as are remedy for these racial ills that arise in this demographic transformation. He

stated in his book that as a response to the browning of America there were four camps that

wish to address this problem. The most notable camp I think is the fourth camp composed of

African American intellectual elites and public figures who perceived the browning of

America as a threat to long established claims of Social Justice.

Advocates of color blindness have focused their ire on those who were hypersensitive

with regards to race and ethnicity. Criticizing people who are race and color conscious. These

criticisms are boils down to ethical and practical claims about recognition in public policy.

According to Sundstrom, the concept of ‘white supremacy’ does not directly address conflicts

that pertain to race and ethnicity that arise from the browning of America. He argues that we

should focus on institutionalized racism that divides minority groups leaving them to fight

over limited resources.

According to him color blindness has been transformed into a legal, political and social

ideal that color, race and ethnicity should be irrelevant in all matters public and private. This

triggered the failure of color blindness as a remedy for racial ills because of its desire to

eliminate the concept of race without eliminating racism or as he puts it “rectifying it’s past

3

IDENTITY POLITICS

harms”.

This paper seeks to present the dynamics of redistribution, recognition and intersectional

in identity politics. It also seeks to answer how the concerns over recognition and

redistribution affected identity-based politics as well as how the trend of intersectionality

analysis provide for the pursuit of the latter and the former’s goals.

Identity based politics and the Redistribution-Recognition Dilemma

Identity politics over the decade can be described as a “form of pedagogy that links

social structure with the insights of poststructuralism regarding the nature of subjectivity

while incorporating a Marxist commitment to politics” (Bromley as cited in Bernstein 2005).

It can manifest itself in both the psychological and the social sphere. According to Bernstein,

identity politics is considered cultural because groups are advocating for recognition and

fighting to gain respect of cultural differences. Identity based politics usually assumes that the

core of the individuals personhood is their identities and that because of this they act or

behave in accordance with it. Like for example, same sex desiring people relate to their

sexuality as the core of their personhood. Identity is the core of an individual’s personhood in

identity-based politics they act to be able to preserve and uphold this identity (Misra &

Chandiramani, 2005).

The issue of the redistribution and recognition dilemma is important to identity-based

politics because of the social constructed norm that subjects of identity-based movements try

to fight. Social injustice is the reason why identity based politics exists and to be able to

eradicate or at least diminish social injustice, these movements should be knowledgeable of

the redistribution and recognition concerns. Identity politics is used to describe

multiculturalism (Bernstein, 2005). Multiculturalism is one of the concerns in identity politics

and is said to be a pathology in society because it accentuates the so called ‘balkanization’ as

argued by Alcoff.

Identity politics politicized areas of life used to be considered as apolitical. Such areas

are sexuality, interpersonal relations, lifestyle and culture. Leftist scholars most notably

Fraser argued that identity politics is considered to be cultural because they see identity

groups advocating for recognition of and respect for their cultural differences. These scholars

also advocate the separation of Class politics from Identity politics.

Struggles for recognition and redistribution are a product of the politics of

transformation. The politics of transformation was brought about by the decline of the social

4

IDENTITY POLITICS

democracy consensus. This collapse transformed the political landscape. Because of this

transformation as Fraser argued, there was a shift from the politics of redistribution to the

politics of recognition as a product of the change of the citizens’ experience of politics

(Fraser, 1997). This shift is what she called as the Redistribution-Recognition Dilemma.

Moreover, in relation to the politics of gender and sexuality, she argues for the “politics of

transformative redistribution by the liberal welfare state together with the cultural politics of

the deconstructive politics” (Walby, 2002).

Fraser’s theory focused on the struggles for recognition, decoupling from struggles for

redistribution, and the decline of the latter, at least in their class centered egalitarian form.

She illustrated this phenomenon ranging from the battles around multiculturalism to struggle

over gender and sexuality from campaigns of national sovereignty and subnational autonomy

to newly energized movements for international human rights (Thompson, 2011).

Identity Politics and Intersectionality

Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) defined Intersectionality as a “standing for the different

ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of black women’s

employment experiences” (Crenshaw 1989 as cited in Krizsan et al., 2012). Intersectionality

primarily takes its roots in the feminist discourse. This concept of intersectionality showed

the difficulties black women experienced in seeking social justice in legislation because of

the anti-discrimination framework was only based on single-ground prohibitions. According

to Krizsan et al. (2012) one could claim either gender discrimination or racial discrimination

but not the combination of both. Crenshaw’s critique can be correlated with Sundtsrom’s

argument of the notion of ‘color blindness’ wherein people of color consider this as a threat

to long lived traditions of civil rights that were given to them by the US constitution. The US

constitution is said to be colorblind, however—as Crenshaw argues—it failed to recognize

the “specificity of structural intersectionality and the specific forms of domination and

suppression this entails” (Krizsan et al., 2012). Crenshaw defined structural intersectionality

as inequalities that people experience based on single grounds. Intersectionality was further

defined by Davis (2008) in her ‘buzzword’ as a term that refers to the interaction of gender,

race, and other categories of difference in terms of private life, social practices, institutional

arrangements and cultural ideologies, as well as the outcomes of these interactions in terms of

power (Davis 2008 as cited in Krizsan et al., 2012). Furthermore, intersectional analysis is

‘how oppression, subordination and privilege cut across different systems of differentiation’

5

IDENTITY POLITICS

(Borchost and Teigen 2012 as cited in Krizsan et al., 2012).

To exemplify intersectionality, Crenshaw presented the study of battered women’s

shelters located in minority communities in Los Angeles. To quote her:

In most cases, the physical assault that leads women to these shelters is merely the

most immediate manifestation of the subordination they experience. Many 'women who seek

protection are unemployed or underemployed, and a good number of them are poor. Shelters

serving these women cannot afford to address only the violence inflicted by the batterer; they

must also confront the other multilayered and routinized forms of domination that often

converge in these women's lives, hindering their ability to create alternatives to the abusive

relation-ships that brought them to shelters in the first place (Crenshaw, 1994).

She further argues that women of color are not only burned by poverty, child-care

responsibilities, and the lack of job skills but also gender and class oppression. She argues

that in fact, poverty is a consequence of gender and class oppression compounded in the

racial discrimination in the work place as well as housing practices these women face

(Crenshaw, 1994).

In a sociological perspective, Ferree and Choo (2010) distinguished three styles of

understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system

centered. The first, research focused on multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives.

The second, intersectionality as a process presents power as “relational, seeing the

interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at various points of intersection, and

drawing attention to unmarked groups” (Choo and Ferree, 2010). The last saw

intersectionality as a factor that shapes the entire social system and situates analysis away

from associating specific inequalities with unique institution and emphasized “looking for

processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex” (Choo and

Ferree, 2010). According to them, recent feminist scholarship presents race, class, and gender

as closely interwoven and argues that these forms of stratification need to be studied in

relation to each other, conceptualizing them, as either “matrix of domination” or “complex

inequality”(Choo and Ferree, 2010). Their paper entitled Practicing Intersectionality in

Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the

Study of Inequalities sought to answer what it means for sociologists to practice

intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. In theorizing

6

IDENTITY POLITICS

intesectionality, Choo and Ferree highlighted three dimensions that became part of what

intersectionality signifies. First it emphasized the importance of the perspective that focused

on multiply-marginalized people, especially women of color. Second, it presented the

analytic shift from addition of multiple independent strands of inequality toward a

multiplication and thus transformation of their main effects into interactions; and lastly a

focus on multiple institutions as overlapping in their co-determination of inequalities and

their production—as Choo and Ferree argued—“of complex configurations from the start,

rather than “extra” interactive processes that are added onto main effects” (Choo and Ferree,

2010).

Conclusion

Redistribution and Recognition arose from desire to remedy Social Injustices in both

the cultural and the socioeconomic sphere. The concerns over redistribution and recognition

merely focused on whether they are separate from each other. The left conceptualized the

separation of these two concepts and asserted the recognition of class status. However, Alcoff

asserts that redistribution and recognition is interwoven because in the first place,

redistribution is the raison d’etre of identity-based movements. On the other hand,

Sundstrom’s argument takes into consideration the importance of the politics of

transformation which I think is the main factor for the paradigm shift from redistribution to

recognition. This politics of transformation influenced how people interpret their experience

asserting the recognition of their identities in the process. He concentrated his arguments on

the concept of color blindness that resulted to the transformation that was brought about by

the browning of America.

To reiterate, the shift from redistribution towards recognition is a product of

the fall the social democracy consensus. In turn this transformation also influence a shift in

people’s way of thinking. They started to focus more on their experiences leading to the

emphasis on the role that their identities play in how they are evaluated in society. The

concept of intersectionality became an important component of this transformation as

exemplified by Crenshaw. Color blindness in the US manifested this problem of

intersectionality. Emphasizing Sundstrom’s argument that color blindness does not eradicate

racism because it fails to consider the specificity of structural intersectionality and the

specific forms of domination and suppression it entails. This then means that the trend of

intersectional analysis introduced by Black feminists provides solid arguments of the pursuit

of either or both recognition and or redistribution goals because intersectionality emphasizes

7

IDENTITY POLITICS

that relationship between gender and race and the constraints that go with these terms. The

case of a White poor woman is different from the case of a Black poor woman by virtue of

intersectionality.

Concerns over recognition and redistribution transformed the focal point of the

theoretical analysis of identity-based politics. It emphasized the shift from focusing

redistribution to recognition. It draw a new way of looking at the reason for the struggles of

which identity based movements advocate. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg

because the underlying basis for these concerns is the concept of intersectionality.

Intersectionality is a more complex structure because it transforms the dynamics of the

concerns over recognition and redistribution. Intersectionality analysis entails for the pursuit

of the latter and the former as a form of upholding social justice and an attempt to eradicate

social injustice.

References

Alcoff, Linda. 2006. Visible Identities:Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press.

pp. 11-46.

Bernstein, Mary. 2005. Identity Politics. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 31, pp. 47-74.

Cernshaw, Kimberlé W. 1994. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and

Violence Against Women of Color.” From The Public Nature of Private Violence.

eds by Martha Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk. Taylor & Francis/Routledge.

Choo, Hae Yeon, and Ferree, Myra Marx. 2010. “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological

Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study

of Inequalities”. In Sociological Theory. Washington DC: American Sociological

Association, pp 129-149.

Deranty, Jean-Philippe. 2003. Conceptualising Social Inequality: Redistribution or

Recognition?. In Social Inequality Today. Macquarie University. Retrieved from:

http://www.crsi.mq.edu.au/public/download.jsp?id=10573

Fraser, Nancy. 1997. From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a

“Postsocialist” Age. Routledge. Retrieved from:

http://ethicalpolitics.org/blackwood/fraser.htm

Fraser, Nancy.1996. Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution,

Recognition, and Participation. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Stanford

University. Retrieved from: http://www.intelligenceispower.com/Important%20E-

mails%20Sent%20attachments/Social%20Justice%20in%20the%20Age%20of

8

IDENTITY POLITICS

%20Identity%20Politics.pdf.

Krizsan Andrea, Skjeie, Hege, and Squires,Judith. 2012. Institutionalizing Intersectionality:

The Changing Nature of European Equality Regimes. Palgrave Macmillan.

Misra, Geetanjali, and Chandiramani Radhika. 2005.Sexuality, Gender and Rights:

Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia.India: SAGE

Publications.

Sundstrom, Ronald. 2008. “Colorblindness and the Browning of America”. In The Browning

of America and the Evasion of Social Justice. US: SUNY Press. pp. 37-64.

Thompson, Simon. 2006. The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction. UK:

Polity Press.

Walby, Sylvia. 2002. “From Community to Coalition: The Politics of Recognition as the

Handmaiden of the Politics of Equality in an Era Globalization.” In Recognition and

Difference: Politics, Identity, Multiculture, eds. Scott Lash, Mike Featherstone.UK:

SAGE, pp. 113 -138.

9